DIRTY SALLY

DIRTY SALLY

She was old as the Bible and could curse like a sailor,
A shoe-in for crime but at romance a failure.

No tougher cowgirl had ever come before her,
And there has been no tougher since.

Many a ragged mile she would ride,
Hugging her horse as it jumped the fence.

And she went down fighting at the end,
Down the dusty road by the river’s bend.

Dirty Sally died in her boots.
Wednesday it was when she left us,
A wild rapscallion, a gloomy guss.

Doesn’t anyone sing for this ragged cowgirl?

Doesn’t anyone want to dance around the funeral pyre for Dirty Sally?
To eulogize the bullet holes in her ancient life?
To memorialize her pain and her never ending strife?

Doesn’t anyone sing for this ragged cowgirl?

Dirty Sally, who never took a man
And who had gaps in her western teeth.

Doesn’t anyone pause to visit her grave
And on it place a tender wreath?

She built her own silences, built her own cradle,
Dug her own grave,
Here in the land of the free,
Here in the home of the brave.

She died unforgiven, her sins unatoned,
And left behind nothing but a skull and some crossbones.

Oblivious to the pain she had caused you and me.
Let us dance around the funeral pyre, wish her a gorgeous eternity.

Dirty Sally died in her boots.
Wednesday it was and raining.
And the world never noticed, turning ‘round like a whirl.
Doesn’t anyone sing for this ragged cowgirl?

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2011
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED